sanctuary

Cacao Journals: Finding Sanctuary

~ nicole
Remember the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you. – Rumi

Sanctuary is vital to me. Where I live, how I live and who I share my life with must be in alignment with that. I love the energy of the natural world, as you know, so my recent move marks a return to living in nature, surrounded by trees, a pond, wildlife and the sound of the ocean in the distance (and a cacophony of tree frogs when I go to sleep :)). I feel a sense of peace and tranquility here that I simply don’t in the city with its energetic human hum and traffic noise.

My ceremonial, drumming, coaching and healing work calls for being present, deeply authentic and in full integrity in every moment, which means I must cultivate and call on my own inner sanctuary to be of service.

I cultivate inner sanctuary in several ways: 1) living in nature, or when I can’t, visiting it frequently in silent devotion, 2) quieting my mind in meditation and noticing when it gets too noisy in there or too darn critical, and 3) journeying to the drum or with cacao and hanging out with my spirit guides, who just happen to live in beautiful natural landscapes or should I call them “soulscapes”?

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time. – Hermann Hesse

In cultivating my outer sanctuary, I have to know what environment and energies bring me inner peace and tranquility. For instance, I’m a forest, lake and beach girl; you may be a meadow, desert or mountain girl or guy.

Find your outer sanctuary and “go” there often by bringing it inside of you. Even if it’s thousands of miles away, put on some music that calls you there, close your eyes, and imagine being there. Take it in with all your senses. Or come journey with me and I will take you to that place.

Sanctuary is much like how we dress here in Northern California; it comes in layers, both outer and inner. Cultivate all your sanctuaries. You will discover they bring you the clarity of mind, focus, inspiration and illumination you need to bring your creativity and brilliance fully into the world. Not to mention inner wisdom and deep peace….

Copyright ©2018 Soulscape Coaching LLC

Finding the courage to come out of the woods….

~ Nicole Gnutzman
Do not look for a sanctuary inside anyone except yourself. – Buddha
Remember…the entrance to the sanctuary is within you. – Rumi

I am a woodland elf, or at least that’s what my husband affectionately calls me. I must admit that I do look a bit elvish (someone also once called me Cindy Lou Who from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas), but I digress…. And I do thrive in the woods; there’s just something about the energy of trees and sunshine.

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And so, living into my elvish nature, I lived on “retreat” in the redwoods near Mendocino, CA for the past year guiding clients to find their soul’s path and gifts and deepening my own inner transformation. It was the perfect work–life balance and the most nourishing sanctuary I have ever experienced. I could have stayed there forever nibbling on nuts and berries or whatever elves eat.

p1020734But Life or Spirit or the Universe had another idea in mind. Just when you think you have let go of everything you no longer need, you realize there’s always more, more to let go of and more to live into….. So, you ask, what had I become so attached to, that I didn’t want to let go of? My sanctuary in the woods.

Yup, I was getting a bit too comfortable there, all cozy by the wood fire, holding ceremony in my sacred space in the loft, and working remotely in my pajamas (actually, I wore real clothes, but I could have been in my PJ’s).

And then, the owner of our cabin (we rented), sold it! I was in shock; I was in denial all the way through escrow; I was simply devastated. And I discovered that I was not immune to the effect of change. The rugs that gets pulled out from under us take many forms; mine happened to be made of wood and glass and stone.

So, we found ourselves having to find another sanctuary, something we had done before, so we weren’t too worried. We’d always been pretty good at manifesting beautiful places to live. Only this time, nothing showed up. Or what showed up was so not right for us that we started to question ourselves. Were we not clear about what we wanted, were we sending Spirit mixed messages, or did She have something else in mind for us?

In a moment of deep sadness, I prayed to Spirit and asked why I was losing my home and sanctuary, and She gently told me, “Your sanctuary is within. You carry it everywhere you go. It is all you need.”

Perhaps it was time for me to come out of the woods…. Especially now. Staying in the woods when conscious awareness and activism are so needed at this time would have been my version of running away, an escape from hard reality, a retreat of a whole other kind.

So, here I am, writing this from our sailboat in Sausalito, our tiny home on the water for now, re-engaging with life, old friends and community; finding ways to be of service; and bringing my gifts to guide others to find theirs, so we may heal and be whole, strengthen our resiliency and resolve, and co-create the world we want to see.

We all have our own woods to which we retreat. And we each are our own sanctuary. What’s needed now is for us to find the courage to come out of the woods, find ways to nourish our inner sense of sanctuary, and find ways to share our gifts and be of service.

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The gift of retreating

~ Nicole Gnutzman
“There is nothing more natural than for Life to align with Light in a sacred dance of co-existence and co-creation.”  – Birgitte Rasine, The Serpent and the Jaguar: Living in Sacred Time

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The Lake (Lake Atitlan) called me back and I returned, not alone this time as on my first solo retreat, but with 10 beautiful and brave souls, who were open to whatever awaited them there. And what awaited was more than any of us imagined.

As we opened to our retreat, we left the bustling world behind and immersed ourselves in a new energy, an interplay of quiet solitude and tribal community, relaxation and movement, restoration and revitalization, and receiving and giving.

img_2981We closed ourselves off to the world as we knew it and entered a cocoon, a sanctuary, to emerge from our chrysalis more vibrant and alive, and with bright wings that allowed us to rise above ourselves and the world and see with new eyes.

We lived into the spiral of life, the intertwining energies of the four elements: creation and destruction (fire), nourishment and growth (earth), deepening and flow (water), inspiration and clarity (air). And we yearned to take that emergence and transformation home with us, back into the world.

Re-entry into that world is always challenging after retreat as it seems less real or even unreal, an alternate reality of frenzied, ungrounded energy, disconnected from our own deeply felt experience while on retreat.

Retreating brings us back to our true selves, and we want to bring that radiant energy and truth back with us. It can feel like a burden as the world does not always welcome truth and radiance, but it’s a gift we must give to the world, knowing that everything we give will return to us perhaps not in that moment, but in time.

Our inclination may be to protect what we experienced, shielding it from the unremitting, relentless darkness of the world. If that helps us to keep the light within us alive, then let us hide it for awhile, but know, to hide it for too long, weakens it; it needs to be given to others, so they may shine too, and in their shining, their energy comes back to us. It is the energy of life, the spiral on its return journey, the law of attraction, flow.

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If we have one mission in this life it is to rediscover who we truly are, so we can offer our light and our gifts to the world as we walk on our soul’s path. Retreating from the world for just a little while to deepen that connection to ourselves and to life itself allows us the spaciousness we need to restore that light. And then we, and others we touch with our light, can shine.

Many of us will return again to Atitlan. Our retreat may become an annual celebration of the transformative power of the Lake and our own transformation….

Copyright ©2016 Soulscape Coaching LLC

 

Effort or surrender?

~ Nicole Gnutzman
Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot. I am learning to live between effort and surrender. – Danielle Orner

IMG_2357I’m with Danielle. I too am learning to live in the liminal space between effort and surrender, and some days I’m better at it than others…. I see this same struggle in many of my friends and clients, who have excelled in life by being fully in control, until something told them in no uncertain terms that they actually weren’t.

When we experience a loss or a longing that cannot be filled by ordinary measures of effort, it can cause us to question our beliefs about life and ourselves. Few of us want to accept life as uncertain; we want certainty and guarantees, and safe risk (if that’s even possible). Uncertainty, unpredictability and ambiguity make us very uncomfortable.

When we realize that our belief about life has been mistaken, we find ourselves at a loss of what to go do, so we keep doing the same thing over and over again–and that’s like doing more of the same and expecting a different result. It’s an infinite loop that never ends or a wall we keep running into. Effort, although it feels safer and more familiar, may not be the place to go to find resolution.

When we’ve exhausted ourselves and our options, we come to the realization that we have to let go of something, whether it’s a belief, pattern, or issue, that’s holding us back from what we truly want (more joy, connection, purpose, etc.). That letting go is what is called in spiritual terms, “surrender,” and it doesn’t feel either safe or familiar to those of us who have relied solely on effort.

 

Finding the sweet spot between effort and surrender just may be the key to our frustration and discomfort. Seeing with new eyes that surrender and effort can be complementary–a “both/and” rather than an “or.” What if we surrendered to surrendering? And then acted from there?

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Two resources that came to me as I was looking for guidance in this realm have beautiful ways of navigating this liminal space. The process in each, even though they come to it from very different healing perspectives, is strikingly similar. Each has tremendous value and power in itself, and I also found in working with both that blending the two is a truly powerful combination.

The first resource by Michael Mirdad, a spiritual healer, is, Healing the Heart & Soul: A Five-Step, Soul-Level Healing Process for Transforming your Life, which takes a more spiritual approach based on his work with A Course in Miracles. His healing method follows this path:

  1. Recognizing the issue: the courageous step of recognizing the need for healing and choosing to make a significant change in your life
  2. Accepting: taking responsibility for identifying the cause(s) of the issue and acknowledging the deeper emotions behind it
  3. Surrendering: surrendering all issues, emotions, people, events unconditionally by giving them to a higher power for healing
  4. Refilling: consciously calling in guidance and healing from a higher power and receiving the message
  5. Giving Thanks: releasing the issue, showing gratitude for the healing and acknowledging your readiness to move on.

The second resource, which I mentioned in an earlier post, by Leslie Davenport, a family therapist and ordained minister, is Healing and Transformation through Self-Guided Imagery, which walks us through self-guided meditation to access our heart’s guidance. Her path to healing and transformation is:

  1. Asking what you need guidance about: one word or phrase that encapsulates the issue
  2. Accessing your heart: bringing attention to your breathing by breathing in “Clarity” and breathing out “Peace”
  3. Discovering your inner sanctuary: allowing an image to arise of a place where you feel most at peace
  4. Bringing your issue to heart: holding your issue up to receive guidance (surrender)
  5. Receiving your heart’s guidance: asking your heart for “a wise and loving response”
  6. Thanking your heart: thanking your heart for its message and integrating its wisdom into your daily life through action.

What’s so amazing is that each process only takes about 20 minutes to complete, and you can do them all on your own. With both, I’ve found writing in a journal helps with the discovery process and integrating the healing guidance into my life.

Surrender all that no longer serves you. Let all that remains buried in your heart come to the surface and be healed. Let there be space for new energies to enter. A new beginning transforms darkness to light. – Anonymous

For those of us who are used to efforting, these powerful, transformative processes provide us with the steps to find our way to surrender and access our inner knowing, which then guides us to right action. We live in that space where both surrender and effort reside.
 

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Copyright ©2016 Soulscape Coaching LLC.

 

 

The sacred is even deeper within us

~ Nicole Gnutzman
A [wo]man must go on a quest
to discover the sacred fire
in the sanctuary of [her] own belly
to ignite the flame in [her] heart
to fuel the blaze in the hearth
to rekindle [her] ardor for the earth
– Sam Keen

P1000364I took the liberty of updating Sam Keen’s gorgeous prose about the sacred to include the feminine experience. When he wrote that piece many years ago, he believed that men were in desperate need of connection to the sacred. I would say the same is true of women, especially today, so we can regain and reclaim a deeper connection to ourselves.

The sacred strips us bare of all pretension, beliefs, and assumptions if we let it. It humbles us. Its fire burns away the things we need to let go of. And it is from that fiery, empty place that we can rediscover our inner sanctuary, the sacredness of our soul, and life-affirming connection to ourselves and to the natural world.

My first experience with being stripped bare and made empty by the sacred was in personal cacao ceremony. I cried like a baby while it opened up depths within me that I didn’t know existed.

We all know that chocolate is sacred on our tongues and in our tummies, but in its more raw form (cacao) it has a long tradition of being revered, celebrated, and used in ceremony by indigenous cultures in South and Central America, the place from which it first came.

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Cacao allowed me to find that place inside of myself where the sacred resides, revealing hidden parts of me and my connection to life, and set me on my soul’s path. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have been so intent on finding my soul’s path if I hadn’t opened myself fully to it.

Cacao ceremony became a practice for me, not a daily one (it can, as you might imagine, be quite stimulating), but certainly every few weeks. It brings me back in touch with the sacred like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. I am so enamored of its power to reconnect us to our deeper selves that I offer it in  one-on-one sessions as well as at retreats or when I’m invited to share it at group gatherings.

Many of the beautiful women with whom I have had the honor to share cacao have said that they experienced profound, heart-opening realizations. My own experience has been one of deep insight and wisdom, unconditional love and compassion, and healing. Although, it hasn’t always been all love and light; cacao opens us up to our darkness too, but in a healing way, so we can become whole again.

When I began this work with cacao, my dreams became much more vivid and profound as if I was tapping into the sacred in all aspects of my life, both waking and sleeping. The richness of dream language is astonishing in its ability to cut to the quick of things. It’s as if the picture it paints is made up of tiny puzzle pieces that we have to rearrange into a new, more meaningful picture we can understand and truly see. If we allow it, our dreams change our perspective; they open us more fully to our inner wisdom.

IMG_2609The sacred wisdom of ceremony and dreams reveal that the sacred is even deeper within us. And we have yet to plumb its full depths. As Robert Johnson, the eminent psychotherapist, wrote in his book, Inner Work: Using Dream and Active Imagination for Personal Growth,  “every expression of the unconscious–whether dream, imagination, vision, or ritual–proceeds from the same reservoir deep within. And everything, therefore, works together.”

Learning to work with our deeper selves–our unconscious–through ceremony or dream work, gives us, according to Johnson, “a deep source of renewal, growth, strength, and wisdom. We connect with the source of our evolving character; we cooperate with the process whereby we bring the total self together; we learn to tap that rich lode of energy and intelligence that waits within.”

We touch the sacred fire even deeper within us.